I love movies. I also happen to think they’re terribly important.

Today’s cineplexes provide the housing within which the populace does much of its common thinking about our several matters of importance, from ethics to art; from politics to sex; from the search for universal truth to the search for lasting relationships. Movies can get us going conversationally, champion a cause, or even ask us to change our lives. They can also serve the forces of a crass, committee-driven marketplace and dish out enough of the Lowest Common Denominator to keep us gorging on widget after widget.

Films can do all of the above simultaneously. And as the reigning face of American popular culture exporting itself to the ends of the earth, the film industry is constantly sending out messages about how the citizens of the entire planet should live their lives. Like it or not, movies are just that vital.

Why, then, do we so passively receive the moving pictures? Why do we tend to simply watch and not dare interact?

Here is another way of stating the problem. I am fond of quoting Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar, who contends in his True Self, False Self audio series that “if you pay attention to anything for long enough, you can be converted.” By the time you spend the hour driving to and from the theater, put down your eight dollars, and invest two hours staring at a film, what are the chances you may have been converted to some degree by its ideas? Pretty good, I’d say.

And yet we sit in the dark and take in the movie, and when it’s all over with and we’re asked our opinions, we might say rather vaguely that we liked it just fine, or perhaps we didn’t care for it so much.

Why would we do this? I’m not completely sure (because I can do the same thing), but I suspect it has to do with those Hollywood committees who are more concerned about their finances and marketing reports than they are about our moral and spiritual formation as human beings, much less spiritual beings. They covet the safe provocations, the easily sold and easily told stories that make up the vast majority of films.

For a clear example, I direct your attention to the series of pictures that runs under the title Saw. These empty movies really do nothing more than fetishize the torture of human beings, yet their worldwide gross so far has exceeded half a billion dollars.

On the other hand, Consider the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which brought in $3 billion at the box office worldwide. Think about the values it espouses, the sort of characters it is populated with, the power of its artifice, and the messages it sends out about the relationship between humans and supernatural forces. Now, think about the incredible power of its reach to a global audience of young minds searching for something great to be a part of.

In this instance, the product in question seemed to carry mostly positive connotations, but what if it had not? Perhaps you can see the vastness of the question — the more we passively take it all in, the more we risk losing something essential within ourselves.

The movies offer us a thousand ready-made answers to that old question, “How should we live?” What’s at risk if we can’t or won’t dissect those answers?

There is no magical palliative that will eradicate this problem, other than to simply arm oneself through an educational effort. Find some way to make yourself a more careful movie-watcher, a less passive filmgoer … and thus a more discerning person.
For those who call themselves Christians, this may be one dawning definition of what it means to be “set apart” these days.

The Rev. Torey Lightcap is priest-in-charge of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glenwood Springs (www.saint-barnabas.info). Torey and his wife have two children and live in New Castle.